


when we were together

by fineandwittie



Series: And I'll call you by mine [8]
Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017), Call Me By Your Name - All Media Types, Call Me by Your Name - André Aciman
Genre: Jealousy, Kinda?, M/M, Memories, Oliver's POV, Scene Rewrite, bookverse, i mean there is not a scene after the crying one so technically it still could be both
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-31
Updated: 2018-01-31
Packaged: 2019-03-11 19:17:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13530846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fineandwittie/pseuds/fineandwittie
Summary: A retelling of the scene where Elio turns up in Oliver's classroom fifteen years later from Oliver's POV.





	when we were together

**Author's Note:**

> Unbeta'd as usual.
> 
> Or should I say un-bettah'd. 
> 
> I couldn't help myself with this one.

There was nothing in the world that could have prepared me for seeing Elio again. He had become, by that point some fifteen years after we’d met, something of a dream. An unreality. 

Like being with a group of people and looking at a sepia photograph of something that you were present for. You remember all the details, everything single moment you spent there, but there is a layer of distance between you, as thought perhaps all these tiny details that you know are really all just a figment of your imagination.

And yet, there he was. Standing before me in my own classroom and saying “You probably don’t remember me,” as though I could have forgotten a single moment. 

I hadn’t recognized him immediately. He’d filled out, his gangly frame thicker, but still willowy. His jawline was even more pronounced under his closely trimmed beard and his hair longer. 

I was filled with a sudden buzzing excitement that spread out to the tips of my fingers. “Good God—Elio!” I couldn’t have stopped myself from pulling him into a hug if my very life had depended on it. 

God, he felt so good, clinging to me like that morning at the train station all the years ago. I knew I was clinging to him just as fiercely. He seemed to breath life into me, where it had been missing before. 

God I loved him. No less than I had that summer, but differently. My love for Elio had been banked, a fire no longer burning so desperately hot, by necessity. It had been compressed, though never pushed away, and had become a cornerstone upon which I built myself. So much of me, of who I became and how I interacted with my wife, my children, my friends, had come from Elio and his family. I couldn’t and didn’t want to imagine the man I’d be without having met them. Without having loved Elio.

I pulled back and laid my hands on his face, ostensibly feeling his beard. How easy it would be to let one hand slide around to the back of his neck, to pull him in for the kiss I could not give him on the long ago winter night. 

I laughed and let my hands drop. I could not touch him. If I kept touching him, I wouldn’t be able to stop myself kissing him at some point. All the old memories were rushing back in a tide of scent and feel and taste. 

I tried and failed to convince him to come home with me to meet my family. His refusal was sharp, final, and recalled that old hurt. Both in him and in myself.

I ached for him, for what I’d done to him. “You never did forgive me, did you?”

He was right not to forgive me, was Elio. I didn’t forgive myself. I had taken something from him that long ago summer that I am certain he didn’t not understand that he was giving. Looking at him standing in front of me again, I thought perhaps that he wouldn’t have given it, if he’d known. 

“Forgive? There was nothing to forgive.” He said and then lied. I couldn’t tell if the forgiveness was a lie or his happiness or both. He sounded sincere when he said it, almost earnest, which is how I knew it to be a lie.

He’d never managed to offer me truths that didn’t sound like misdirections, that weren’t vague and nearly meaningless, but which I understood exactly.

And I was once again on the Berm, with his hand resting, hot and clutching, on my crotch. I had to move, needed to focus on something other than the overwhelming power of that sense memory. I would get hard, here in my classroom, otherwise. I led him to my office, introducing him to colleagues and tipping my hand as I went.

I saw the recognition in his eyes, the momentary confusion at how very much I knew about his career, about his life. 

The life of a world famous composer and musician is not nearly as private as he perhaps thought. Which was no fault of mine. If pressed, I’d blame the internet. 

The internet…It strikes me hard, abruptly, that if there had been such a thing when we first met, we might never have reached this point. Standing across a narrow, but infinitely deep chasm, which I doubted we’d ever manage to bridge.

But it didn’t do to dwell on dreams. 

He didn’t mention it, so I wasn’t forced to excuse my borderline stalking. He lived a scant fifty miles from me and I was frequently in the city for work, for research, or to visit my mother who still lived in the old brownstone near Central Park. Each time, I would walk by the conservatory where he taught. I would walk by the concert hall where he would occasionally premiere a piece. I had on three separate occasions attended these concerts. He played even more beautifully now than he’d done then, but no matter how complex the piece or how impressive his new score, when he sat down at the piano, I felt the simple notes of his transcribed Bach in the marrow of my bones. 

But he didn’t know all that. Could never and would never know any of that. 

We moved in silence for a moment, him clearly thinking quite intently on something. I spent the time sneaking glances at him. It was like my first taste of apricot juice, like finally dropping into the pool after spending hours in _heaven_ , like nothing else I’d experienced since.

“The truth is I’m not sure I can feel nothing. And if I am to meet your family I would prefer not to feel anything.” He seemed frozen for a heartbeat, before adding, “Perhaps it never went away.” 

His voice was thin and lost, as though this might be the first time he was admitting this truth even to himself. “I don’t think it went away.” Elio repeated, voice louder, but no more forceful.

My breath came short for a moment, pain radiating out from my chest like a punch to the solar plexus. _I don’t think it went away._ meant _I still love you, Oliver._ to him, but to me it meant _you are not alone in this. you are not adrift in a sea of your memories because I am there with you._

There was nothing I’d ever wanted to hear quite as much as I wanted to hear him say what he’d just admitted. And I couldn’t not bear that he had. I wanted to force the words back down his throat or fold them up tight and tuck them into my heart for safekeeping.

I said, “So,” and we went for drinks.

But before all that, we stopped by my office and I showed him the postcard that I’d stolen from his room. Our room. “I often thought about this Maynard guy. _Think of me someday._ ” I couldn’t keep the bitterness out of my voice.

“Your predecessor.” He offered.

My predecessor? I have no idea what kind of expression crossed my face then because he hastened to add, “No, nothing like that,” before changing the subject.

I didn’t believe him. Was it some kind of tradition then? Graduate students came to stay with the Perlmans and to sleep with Elio. I could see it in my mind’s eye. Him like I’d known him, only maybe a little young, bent over his desk or the railing if it were dark enough, being pounded by some faceless, twenty-something. I hated the thought. I hated that I’d thought it. And the irrational, impossible jealousy that accompanied it. I had no claim over Elio then and I certainly had no claim over him now. He had never really been mine at all because even when we’d been sleeping together, he spent his afternoons fucking Marzia. 

Had he done that to Maynard too? I would almost sympathize if I didn’t hate _him_ so much.

I had never pretended to be a good man, but the depths to which I sunk sometimes surprised even me. Still, when he suggested getting a drink at his hotel, my sight momentarily dimmed with the flood of images his words conjured.

His naked body stretched across white sheets, his mouth gaping for a kiss just like it used to, his long cock flushed and ready for me to sit on it. Him on his stomach, offering himself to me like a feast, asscheeks spread and held. Him standing above me, hands buried in my hair, as he brutally fucks into my throat or on his knees before me. Imagined pictures of how he’d look now mixing together with memories from fifteen years before, no less sharp with age than they’d been the day or week after.

He must have misread my distraction because his face cooled a degree or two. “I said a drink, not a fuck.”

I flushed at that, having been caught out. God, the sound of that word from his lips was like a hand on my cock. He stared at me, looking incredulously at the pink in my cheeks. He would, I prayed, assume it was embarrassment, ironic though that was. I would have accepted whatever explanation he gave that didn’t involve what the actual cause was: a flood of arousal.

We ended up pressed close in the bar at his hotel and it would have been so, so easy to suggest that we retire to his room for a little more privacy. To prompt him to take me upstairs. I had a difficult time keeping track of our conversation, not because it was particularly taxing, but because the soft light of the bar was throwing his bowed mouth with its thicker lower lip and his bright eyes into a sharp relief against the shadow of his beard. I wanted to rack my fingers through it again. I wanted to rack my teeth through it and see if I could bite my way to bare flesh. I wanted to get a straight razor and shave him properly. So he’d look like my Elio again, my Oliver. 

I caught myself twice and each time just managed to prevent myself from calling him by my name. It would have been too much, for him, for me. I wasn't ready for the rejection that would follow. He only wanted a drink, not a fuck. He only wanted a chat, not a confession.

Calling him by my name would have been as obvious as throwing myself to the ground at his feet and begging him to take me. 

I wanted to do both.

I had never in my life before, understood the phrase, “I want to be used hard and put away wet” until that moment. 

Both metaphorically and literally. I imagined him filling me with his cum and then sending me home with it spilling out of my used hole. I imagined him painting my chest, neck, face, crotch, with it. I imagined his hand on my own cock, using it to paint me white. Like the peach on that afternoon so many years ago, he’d watch as I licked it all clean. 

I had to leave. I couldn’t survive much longer here, in this softly lit bar, with him. The cloud of lust would start to clear soon and I would be ruined. I needed to leave, to go home and lock myself in my office and slowly crumble to dust.

He was right. Though I will always love my kids, I have been living in a coma. He was always the only one who could ever breathe life into me. And he was going away again. Maybe I wouldn’t speak to him for another fifteen years. 

I wasn’t sure I could bear that either.

**Author's Note:**

> By the way, I am still accepting Oliver/Elio prompts too. For this series or a stand alone.
> 
> Leave a request in the comments.


End file.
